Abstract

Tuple-space systems based on the LINDA model have been in use in distributed systems for nearly two decades. An area that has recently received attention from the distributed systems community is Swarm Intelligence (SI) --- SI has been successfully used in fields such as robotics and optimisation. Recently its properties have started to attract research in distributed systems. In this paper we merge SI concepts into the LINDA model to provide an adaptive approach to time which is unrelated to external (real) time: the result is the introduction of an adaptive concept of time into the system, without changing the LINDA model --- we call it fading. Some potential applications of this concept are discussed, along with implications for feasible implementation.